Writing to Learn

Learning to write is about developing skills that help writers generate ideas, organize, draft, edit, revise, and publish their original ideas in the form of written text. These are key life skills that benefit students far beyond the task of writing.

Writing to learn, on the other hand, is less about the technical skills of writing and more about using the act of writing to strengthen our thinking process. It’s about writing in order to think deeply about a topic, process it, and make sense of the information. Writing to learn shifts the focus from producing polished final products to using writing as a means of exploration, reflection, and critical thinking.

Writing-to-learn activities often emphasize informal, low-stakes writing activities designed to deepen students’ understanding of concepts. It’s about thinking through writing, so students can process information, clarify their thoughts, and make connections between ideas.

While learning to write is often tasked to English language arts teachers, writing to learn can—and should—happen in every classroom.

Benefits of Writing to Learn

• Enhances Comprehension: Writing helps students synthesize and organize their thoughts, leading to better understanding and retention.
• Encourages Critical Thinking: By engaging with content through writing, students evaluate, analyze, and question what they are learning.
• Provides Think Time: When students write to process their thinking, all students get an equal opportunity to express themselves. Rather than only a few outgoing students getting an opportunity to share, all students get quiet time to think and write.
• Promotes Active Engagement: Instead of passively absorbing information, students engage in the learning process by generating their own ideas and reflections.

Strategies

• Quickwrite: Provide students with 1–5 minutes to write everything they know about a topic or respond to a thought-provoking question. This can be a great way to have students activate prior knowledge at the beginning or as part of a lesson; it can also be used to summarize learning at the end.
• Learning Journal and Reflection Log: Encourage students to write daily or weekly reflections. These may feel similar to a quickwrite, but they are used on a regular cadence. They can work really well as a routine bell-ringer activity to start a class period or as a wrap-up activity, like an exit ticket. These journals will often allow for metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Students might reflect on what they’ve learned, struggles they’ve faced, and questions they still have.
• Think–Pair–Share With Writing: Many teachers use the Think–Pair–Share strategy to have students first think to themselves about a thought-provoking question before sharing it with a partner and then perhaps with the full class. This version of the strategy asks students to write down their ideas as they think. Writing before speaking helps organize ideas and can provide added confidence for students to engage in the verbal discussion that follows. It can set them up for greater success, and it also adds a level of tangible accountability to the thinking step of the process.
• Sentence Stems and Prompts: With this process, the teacher provides part of the sentence—the stem—and students fill in the blanks with their own thoughts and ideas. It’s a great way to scaffold thinking for students, and it’s especially great for developing writers and students who need a little support with processing their ideas into full sentences. Such prompts may include:
  • “One thing I learned today is _____ because _____.”
  • “I used to think _____, but now I think _____.”
    You can create stems that specifically align to your classroom topic and context.
• Annotation and Notes in the Margins: This process encourages interaction with the text by having students write questions, reactions, and summaries in the margins. You can guide these annotations or teach students to watch for opportunities to process the text on their own. You might facilitate some type of structured processing activity that uses these notes later on, once all students have finished reading and processing their own copy of the text.
• Exit Ticket: This can be a structured writing activity at the end of a class period or lesson. It may be used to gauge student understanding, help students process their own learning, and guide future instruction. For example, you might end the lesson by asking students to write a one-sentence summary, a lingering question, or a key takeaway.
• RAFT Writing (Role, Audience, Format, Topic): This is great for expanding student thinking and perspective. It encourages creative thinking and real-world application. To use this strategy, you would assign students different perspectives from which to write, tagged to one or more of the four RAFT scaffolds. For instance, you could assign different roles to different groups of students. Here are examples for each aspect of RAFT:
  • Role: scientist, construction worker, or politician
  • Audience: general public, coworker, or U.S. Senate committee meeting
  • Format: blog post, news article, speech, or conversation
  • Topic: value of space exploration, construction of a new research facility, a newly proposed law or regulation

Technology

You could certainly use any of these strategies without technology. Students could write using paper and pencil, or they could form their answers by thinking and not recording them. However, there are great opportunities to bring in tech tools that can enhance the process, engage students at a higher level, and help you keep ideas organized. Here are a few options to consider:

• Word or Google Doc: Many times, a simple word processing document is all you need. There is no need to overcomplicate the process with a complex tool. These simple tools still offer great features like the ability to highlight and annotate text and also to add comments in the margin. Students can insert images or link to outside resources if needed. If you decide that you want these turned in to the teacher, they are easily shareable, and many learning management systems allow students to upload them into an online assignment portal.
• Padlet: If you’re looking for a tool beyond a shared document where students can see and engage with each other’s ideas, collaborative tools like Padlet are great. You can set up the workspace to be organized in a way that facilitates the writing—perhaps in columns by topic—and each student can add ideas to the interactive workspace.
• Digital Whiteboards: There are multiple digital whiteboard workspaces available. Canva has a good one, and FigJam is another popular choice. These collaborative spaces can offer a less structured environment for students to add ideas, which might include text, drawings, images, links, and more. Sometimes, seeing another student’s idea may trigger a new, original idea—much like what would occur during collaborative brainstorming.
• Blog or Website: You could have students create an online presence like a blog or website. These don’t need to be shared with the world, but they could be if that meets your needs and your school’s permission structure. Otherwise, they can usually be published or shared with a closed audience, like a classroom or just the teacher. Blogger, Google Sites, Weebly, and Wix are good options to explore. For younger students, Seesaw offers a classroom blog option that you can keep very private. As always, you will want to check your local guidelines and expectations and ensure compliance before sharing with audiences beyond the classroom.
• Polling Software: If your goal is to collect student thoughts and gather input to help guide lesson planning, you might want to consider polling software like Socrative. Be sure to select an input option that allows students to write out their responses, rather than simply checking a number on a survey or poll.
• AI Chatbots: Tools like SchoolAI and MagicSchool allow you to create custom AI chatbots for students to engage with. By crafting custom chatbot experiences aligned to your classroom learning targets, students not only get to write about their learning, but they can also receive feedback and engage in personalized dialogue about what they’ve written. This type of engagement has the potential to take writing to the next level, especially when teachers are challenged with large class sizes.
• AI Feedback: AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are good at writing and processing written ideas. Therefore, you could use them to review and respond to writing. At the student level, students could paste their writing into a chatbot and ask follow-up questions, such as, “What did I miss?” or “What are the strengths of my argument?” As the teacher, you might paste in student responses across your class and ask the chatbot to aggregate the submissions and point out trends and common themes. This could save you a lot of time and make student writing more actionable. If you choose to submit student work, make sure that no student names are included, and again, ensure that your actions are in compliance with your local guidelines and policies.

AVID Connections

This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:

• Instruction
• Rigorous Academic Preparedness
• Student Agency
• Insist on Rigor

Extend Your Learning

• What is Writing to Learn? (WAC Clearinghouse)
• Writing to Learn (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction)
• Write to Learn: The Power of Personal Writing (Courtney Brown via Center for Professional Education of Teachers)